Judge Grants Search Warrant For Everyone Who Searched a Crime Victim's Name On Google (startribune.com)

Hennepin County District Judge Gary Larson has issued a search warrant to Edina, Minnesota police to collect information on people who searched for variations of a crime victim's name on Google from Dec. 1 through Jan. 7. Google would be required to provide Edina police with basic contact information for people targeted by the warrant, as well as Social Security numbers, account and payment information, and IP and MAC addresses. StarTribune reports: Information on the warrant first emerged through a blog post by public records researcher Tony Webster. Edina police declined to comment Thursday on the warrant, saying it is part of an ongoing investigation. Detective David Lindman outlined the case in his application for the search warrant: In early January, two account holders with SPIRE Credit Union reported to police that $28,500 had been stolen from a line of credit associated with one of their accounts, according to court documents. Edina investigators learned that the suspect or suspects provided the credit union with the account holder's name, date of birth and Social Security number. In addition, the suspect faxed a forged U.S. passport with a photo of someone who looked like the account holder but wasn't. Investigators ran an image search of the account holder's name on Google and found the photo used on the forged passport. Other search engines did not turn up the photo. According to the warrant application, Lindman said he had reason to believe the suspect used Google to find a picture of the person they believed to be the account holder. Larson signed off on the search warrant on Feb. 1. According to court documents, Lindman served it about 20 minutes later.

Comments

First and second reactions

[mccrew]

At first, I was ready to get mad about an over-broad search. But after reading the facts and background info, the warrant doesn't seem unreasonable.

Re:First and second reactions

[Kjella]

The warrant is specifically for Google, specifically about people who searched within a specific timeframe for the specific details used in a specific crime that happened later. They have shown their work to show that Google was the only likely source for that info used in the crime. There are not likely to be any matching results that are not related to the crime, and those that are can be easily eliminated.

Are you on crack? They are looking for someone that googled a person's name. There is absolutely zero, zip, nada, no requirement they searched for anything remotely related to any crime. Or that they searched for this particular individual and not just someone sharing their name. And while the police found the image on Google image search, the warrant is for everyone who used Google the search engine. It's likely the identity thief visited all pages about the victim, there's no reason to believe he used the image search directly that's just a red herring. And well over a month is hardly a specific time frame, if he lost his wallet in the morning and was cleaned out by evening I might agree but this just throwing a huge dragnet. But with bootlickers like you I understand why totalitarianism will win.

Re:So what?

[Dunbal]

Uh, isn't the bank the one who is responsible for credit card fraud? Someone stole $30k from the guy's bank. I'm pretty sure the bank wants to force the guy to cough up the money, and I'm pretty sure a decent lawyer would tear the bank apart and force them to prove the guy was complicit in this theft.

Re:WTF

[lgw]

How does Google have our SS numbers if all we do is search? Is that legal?

Google knows an astonishing amount about you. I chatted with one of their professional racists: the team that determines your race from all the information they have on you from searches, mail, web bugs, and so on. Gotta target them ads.

Want a registry of all Muslims in the US, or perhaps all the Jews? Google has it.

If you dislike this, you can much of these . DuckDuckGo for the win. Outlook.com doesn't suck. Ghostery or other tracking blockers. There's no total escape if you use the internet, but you can avoid situations like this.